The concept of interactive paper leads to new models of publishing and using books, documents, and periodicals. Any printed or rendered document can have associated supplemental materials. These materials may be considered an interactive environment that can be accessed by a user of the described system. In recent years many books have been published with an accompanying CD-ROM or associated web page or website, but for the rendered document and the associated digital materials to be truly mutually beneficial, they need to be more closely coupled than has been possible in the past.
As an example, some books currently have an associated web site on which errata are listed after the book has been published. The process for the reader of discovering errata associated with the particular page he is currently reading, however, is usually inconvenient. It involves going to a computer, turning it on, starting a web browser, typing in the URL of the book's web site, selecting the errata page, and checking the notes to see what applies to the page in question. The user is hardly likely to do this for every page.
In light of these limitations of the prior art, a system which provides the ability to create for a rendered document a richly interactive electronic environment (whether CD-ROM-based, web-based, or otherwise), and to allow a reader of the rendered document to easily move back and forth between a location In the rendered document and associated materials would have particular utility.